1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method to fully use a green pigment having a copper phthalocyanine skeleton as a coloring material of an aqueous ink, and also relates an aqueous ink (hereinafter referred to as “ink”), an ink set, and an ink jet recording method, an ink cartridge, a recording unit and an ink jet recording apparatus using the ink.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has been well known to use an ink (pigment ink) containing a pigment as a coloring material in order to improve the light fastness, gas fastness and water fastness of an image obtained by an ink jet recording method. However, pigments are generally poor in color developability compared with dyes. In color images formed with inks of three primary colors of cyan, magenta and yellow, an image formed with pigment inks has a clearly narrow color reproduction range when dye inks and pigment inks are compared. In view of the above-mentioned circumstances, there is a demand to develop a method to form a color image which has a excellent in color balance and to be able to achieve a broad color reproduction range.
It is thus conducted to form an image with inks of red, green and blue in addition to the inks of three primary colors of cyan, magenta and yellow (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 2001-354886 and 2004-155826 and International Publication No. 2002/100959 Pamphlet). At this time, C.I. Pigment Green 7 and C.I. Pigment Green 36 that are halogenated phthalocyanine pigments are often used as coloring materials for ink jet green inks (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 2000-355665, 2004-339355, 2002-332440 and 2003-012982).